The inventive concepts relate to a substrate-processing apparatus and, more particularly, to a substrate-processing system and a method of aging a substrate-processing apparatus.
Apparatuses for manufacturing semiconductor devices may be interrupted for a predetermined time by periodic inspection, abrupt abnormality inspection, or replacement work of components. In addition, inspection step may be required to normally operate the apparatuses.
In detail, a test substrate instead of a normal substrate may be provided in the apparatus, and an inspection process may be performed on the test substrate under the same conditions as a normal process. Next, the processed test substrate may be inspected to determine whether the apparatus is normally operated or not.
This inspection process using the test substrate is called ‘aging work’. The aging work may include basic particle inspection and may further include various inspections in accordance with a kind of a process performed on the normal substrate. In addition, a wet cleaning process may be periodically performed to a process chamber of the apparatus. In this case, the aging work may include a process of making an environment (e.g., a process environment) capable of performing the process after the wet cleaning process.
However, since a user sets and performs the inspection process when a receiving container (e.g., a front open unified pod (FOUP)) including real substrates to be processed arrives on a load port, the real substrates may be inputted into the apparatus after the inspection process is completed. In other word, the input of the real substrates may be late, so productivity of semiconductor devices may be reduced.